I was excited to see the American Giant sunflowers come in so quickly and reach beautiful heights. Unfortunately, their life cycle was not nearly what I had hoped for. First the heads tipped downward and some of the plants even began to lean and fall. In the end, I thought we could leave them out in the field to offer shade and to dry out in the sun. What actually happened was that they turned into a huge sanctuary for leaf-footed bugs and other pests.
There were some birds that came and ate the bugs and partially dried seeds, which is what I hoped for, but it wasn’t enough to justify continuing to foster a large colony of leaf-footed bugs.
The tragedy of this situation was that in an effort to feed and attract birds, I ended up attracting leaf-footed bugs that attacked my other plants and killed the sunflowers themselves.
Farming is an incredible orchestration of desires and constraints. There is the desire to grow something, but the constraints of defending it against whatever will be attracted to the plants.
The sunflowers were a great novelty for a few days, but then they turned into a habitat for the leaf-footed bugs. There are suggestions that companion planting sunflowers does keep the leaf-footed bugs off tomatoes and other fruits because they are attracted to the seeds. However, I wonder if attracting them and providing a habitat is really effective based on how much damage we still saw to the tomatoes around them.
I still don’t really understand how sunflower seeds are grown, but I did enjoy seeing a monstrous 7-foot flower, even if it was just fun to look at for only a few days.
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